Simon White

Simon is a risk management consultant with over 20 years’ experience in helping organisations to understand and manage risk to their projects’ schedule and cost.

He has worked in a wide variety of industries and major projects and spent two years as UK Risk Analyst for ConocoPhillips, before which he was Senior Consultant and trainer for Pertmaster, Primavera and Oracle.

Simon is recognised as one of the leading practitioners of risk management and analysis and strives for clarity and pragmatism in his work.  He uses methods that allow probabilistic models to be interrogated and understood by project teams and senior management, which helps ensure that risk assessments are reasonable representations of reality, and that they add value by setting and justifying reasonable expectation and positive management action.

Simon has also designed and built commercial risk software (including as a contributing architect to Primavera Risk Analysis / Pertmaster) and continues to develop tools for more practical valuable project and business risk management.

 

 

Synopsis: Where is the risk?

The output of a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) is an indication of how much risk we face. On seeing this output, then next questions stakeholders usually ask is “ok, but where is the risk?”. For example, they may want to understand where the risk is in terms of:

• time (which years face more risk?)
• cost breakdown (which costs carry more risk?)
• work breakdown (which activities carry more risk?)
• risk category (do we have more technical or business risk?)
• owner (who owns the most risk?)

Simon will share his extensive experience of presenting the outputs (and inputs) of a QRA to his clients, and helping them to present it to their stakeholders, particularly in terms of answering this question.

Simon always aims that his QRAs are clear and transparent, both to help validate them, and to communicate and defend them to others. He will argue that a key part of this is to help understand the breakdown of risk – where most of the risk is, according to the assumptions made in the QRA.

The presentation will include a visual quiz, where delegates can challenge themselves to interpret some purely visual QRA inputs and outputs, and to guess what kind of situations they describe.